The Funk Brother

Generosity of spirit and joyous excess are the hallmarks of Roy De Forest’s blissfully excessive art, the subject of a memorial exhibition at George Adams Gallery. (De Forest died last spring at the age of 77.) His paintings, drawings and sculptures were often classified as “California Funk,” a description foisted upon a group of West Coast artists who treated tradition with cheery disregard. No highfalutin intentions, please, we’re Californians.

De Forest wasn’t ignored by the Manhattan art scene, as numerous exhibitions by dealer Allan Frumkin attest. Nor did the artist turn a blind eye to the New York School: Its compositional strategies filter into De Forest’s kaleidoscopic arrays of cowboys, dogs and relentless ornamentation. Yet never would you have caught self-important standard-bearers of high art—Robert Motherwell, say, or Clyfford Still—indulging in such goofball fantasies.

The thing is, De Forest’s paintings aren’t fantasies; they’re real. An artist’s responsibility is to create a fiction we can enter, experience and believe in. How convincingly it’s realized and how much the artist yields to its logic determines its aesthetic viability. The inside-out, every-which-way cosmos De Forest brought to life sprawls like a topographical map and bustles like the No. 6 train at rush hour. There’s not an inch of canvas unaccounted for. Forget horror vacui: De Forest’s all-over and exaggerated pointillism, characterized by blips of acrylic squeezed directly from the tube, aren’t obsessive; they’re a celebration of life’s bounty.

The rough-hewn vigor of American folk art informs the paintings, as does the unmediated nature of children’s art. But De Forest’s sophistication precluded sentimentality—the strong coloration, surprising and intricate narratives and general air of ecstasy recall non-Western art, particularly Himalayan painting.

The flattened, topsy-turvy landscape in Silas Newcastle Goes Down (1966) has a hallucinogenic fervor that upsets its symmetrical composition. Black Horse Meadow (2004-2005), with its drowsy haze of soft yellows, is as quaint and warm as the wallpaper in grandma’s living room.

De Forest got cute with his handmade frames—kitschy self-consciousness didn’t suit him—and the drawings are too wispy to invigorate their rolling landscapes and clustered doodles. But the paintings offer glittering proof that happiness, optimism and unapologetic good will are their own reward—and ours.

“Roy De Forest: A Memorial Exhibition” is at George Adams Gallery, 525 West 26th Street, until Feb. 16.

De Montebello Departs

After 30 years as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director, Philippe de Montebello has announced his retirement.

As annoying as museum audio guides are, one has to admit that overhearing the buzz of Mr. de Montebello’s stentorian voice elaborating on the Met’s treasures will be missed. Velásquez, Renaissance tapestries, Leonardo, Byzantium and the acquisition of Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1666-1667)—would that each of us could look back on such grand ambitions so beautifully realized.

Mr. de Montebello has been rightly criticized for a lack of interest in contemporary art. How else could he have allowed his curators to let Damien Hirst’s slick nihilism—you know, that dead shark thing—inside the museum’s doors? But the majestic renovation of the Greek and Roman galleries alone redeem that slight stumble. Best of all, Mr. de Montebello has proven that populism needn’t preclude high standards, and that elitism doesn’t equal snobbery—his respect for the general audience has resulted in record audiences. His will be a daunting legacy to follow.

Picasso’s Ghost

Riddled by the ghost of Cubism and Pop’s cool ironies, painter Ron Linden’s milky investigations of surface, space and denuded biomorphism are only nominally sensual—paint-as-stuff chases after painting as intellectual pursuit. Mr. Linden’s gift is that brainy impatience doesn’t quell a fractured and elusive poetry—if anything it engenders it.

“Ron Linden” is at the CUE Art Foundation, 511 West 25th Street, until Jan. 26.

Solid Light

Kate Protage’s cityscapes get stranger the longer you look at them. What at first seem conventional valentines to New York gradually morph into blurry arrays of melting, tangible form. Entranced by how the night is punctuated by passing traffic, Ms. Protage renders light almost disconcertingly malleable—it’s as if you could mold it in your hands. Credit a painter capable of resonant shifts in earthy color, lucid transparencies and affection for putting brush to canvas that is handsome and true.

“Kate Protage: Urban Eye” is at Allen Sheppard Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, until Jan. 26.

Strange Ritual

Ryan Mrozowski’s paintings trade in impenetrable, ritualistic narratives—an astronaut undergoing a riverside baptism, for instance, or stilt walkers overseeing the manufacture of unknown and complicated devices. The paintings evince a sociological fascination with mass spectacle—distance and anonymity reign.

Mr. Mrozowski’s hand is meticulous and often affected; his moody and mysterious dioramas are sometimes impeded by chilly contrivance. At his oddball best, Mr. Mrozowski locates the quiet despair inherent to a life lived vicariously.

“Ryan Mrozowski: Arm in Arm With the Empty Spirit” is at Pierogi Brooklyn, 177 North Ninth Street in Williamsburg, until Feb. 4.